An operation involving dozens of police departments from around the globe has resulted in mass arrests in a worldwide child pornography ring.
Last Thursday, Toronto police said that 348 people had been arrested as part of a three-year pornography investigation and at least 386 sexually abused children had been rescued globally as well. The operation, known as Project Spade, involved 30 police forces from countries like Australia, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong, Norway and the United States, in addition to the United States Postal Inspection Service.
Canadian Police Service Chief William Blair held a news conference last week announcing the arrest.
According to Blair, the investigation began in 2010 after undercover officers made contact with a Toronto man named Brian Way who’d been suspected of running a company that distributed child pornography videos. The 42-year-old owner was charged with operating the website Azovfilms.com, which authorities found to have distributed and sold child porn. Blair said the owner of the website encouraged people through monetary rewards to “film children for the purpose of creating movies for sale on his website,” which were then distributed internationally.
Out of the 348 arrests made, 108 were in Canada, 76 in the United States and 65 in Australia. Among the arrested were school teachers, doctors, actors, youth sports coaches, Canadian Big Brother volunteers, law enforcement personnel, foster parents and priests.
Of the 76 arrested in the United States, 20 have already pleaded guilty. The U.S. arrests included the chief probation officer of San Mateo County in California, a state trooper in Oregon, police officers in Connecticut and Texas and an FBI program manager. Some of the other American suspects had close access to children, including an elementary school teacher in Georgia, a vice principal in a New Jersey middle school, a high school basketball coach in Ohio, a senior executive with the Indiana Boy Scouts and the medical director of a prestigious private high school.
“It is alleged that officers seized hundreds of thousands of videos detailing horrific sexual acts against very young children, some of the worst that they have ever viewed,” said Inspector Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, head of Toronto’s Sex Crimes Unit, at the news conference.
According to Blair and Beaven-Desjardins, the U.S. Postal Investigation Service assisted in combing through the company’s database to track down both the producers and the consumers of the videos, which Way marketed as naturist movies and claimed were legal in Canada and the United States.
Police executed a search warrant at Way’s company and home, seizing close to 1,000 pieces of evidence, including DVD burners, servers, computers, a video-editing suite and hundreds of movies.
More than 45 terabytes of data were seized.
“This operation shows that international police cooperation works,” said Norwegian police spokesman Bjoern-Erik Ludvigsen in a released statement. “Despite large amounts of material and that this is time-consuming work, this shows that the Internet is not a safe haven for crimes against children.”
And Beaven-Desjardins said they’re not done. “[The investigation] is still ongoing; there will be further arrests, and I imagine there will be more children that will be saved because of it,” said Beaven-Desjardins.